Boats: Speeding! Sailing! Cruising!

Title: Boats: Speeding! Sailing! Cruising!

Author: Patricia Hubbel

Illustrators: Megan Halsey and Sean Addy
Poetry #2

Boats: Speeding! Sailing! Cruising! is an exciting book about, well, boats. Before reading this book I knew very little about boats and now that I have read it I feel like I know a great deal. This would be a perfect book for any young student interested in learning more about the topic. I see this book particularly appealing to male students. Not only is the book fun and exciting, but it is fast-paced and engaging and a perfect example of how wonderful poetry can be. From start to finish the reader is learning new information and is having a blast while doing so. Page after page, the text and pictures appear differently each time. Diagrams and labels are frequently used which only add to the enormous amount of information contained in such a small book.

I see this text as a perfect way to teach elements of poetry as well. There is imagery, rhyming, onomatopoeia, etc. all of which could lead to a poetry lesson following the reading of the book. I also enjoyed the illustrations in this book very much.  Some pages are clearly hand-drawn and colored while others look painted and cartoonish. Some pages are meant to be read and viewed horizontally and others vertically. The idea is each page is different, which makes it more exciting for the reader and ultimately more engaging for the students. Because of this, along with some of the more difficult vocabulary, I would recommend this book in a 2^nd or 3^rd grade classroom and would be sure to include it in my own classroom library someday.